Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel

by Keel, John A.

  In May 1967, a large section of Naples, Italy, had to be evacuated because of an overpowering toxic gas, which no one could identify. Its source was never determined. In June 1967, thousands of residents in towns along the southern shore of Long Island, NY were awakened in the middle of the night by the potent odor of rotten eggs, which was apparently rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities tried to blame New York City’s smokestacks, but they failed to explain how Manhattan’s polluted air could drift out over the Atlantic and then drift back.

  On Jan. 19, 1968, everyone in Lower Manhattan held their noses as acrid, eye-smarting fumes poured over New York and Brooklyn, starting around 8 p.m. New Jersey’s oil refineries took the rap for that one. Unfortunately, the New Jersey smells not only had to fight the ocean breezes, but they also had to build up after peak working hours. Fifteen large luminous objects had been reported just outside Manhattan in the vicinity of Jones Beach the week before, and the phones at neighboring Nassau Shores had been out of action from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 13th (the hours when the objects were reportedly active in the area). Between the 13th and the 19th, there were extensive local power failures in the Bronx, Queens, and on Long Island – another frequent symptom of UFO activity. Could all these things have been mere coincidences? Until we can prove otherwise, we will have to record them as such.

  Speaking of coincidences, on Jan. 9, 1968, the town of Somerville, NJ had to be evacuated because of gas fumes. Two days later, on Jan. 11th, the 2,400 residents of little Archbold, Ohio had to flee their town. Something smelled there, too. The remarkable thing is that apparently both of these incidents were caused by the same thing. We were told the underground gasoline storage tanks at local filling stations had ruptured and leaked into the sewer systems. It is odd that two steel and concrete tanks, in two widely separated towns, should rupture within two days of each other, and that the gasoline would not only find its way into the sewers, but also would linger long enough to create an air-quality crisis in both towns.

  Equally interesting, and even more coincidental, is the recent wave of accidents involving trucks and trains carrying poisonous gasses. There have been six such accidents since Dec. 1967 and, in each case, large areas had to be evacuated until the gas dispersed. It would be unreasonable to blame these apparently random accidents on “flying saucers,” even though the authorities have not been able to give us a good acceptable explanation for them.

  The point remains: In nearly every one of these cases, the areas had to be evacuated, sometimes for days.

  Back in 1963-65, a section of Roger Mills County in Oklahoma had to be evacuated because an evil-smelling “something” had settled there, and was systematically killing off livestock and making all of the inhabitants ill. Forty farms were affected by something that smelled like rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide really gets around... Roger Mills County is on the eastern tip of the state, far removed from any industrial complex – and a helluva long way from New Jersey. The total population of the county is only 5,000.

  This “attack” began in Jan. 1963 on a farm owned by the Daniel Allen family. According to Mr. Allen, they suffered “terrible odors that made us nauseated and ill with suffocating, coughing, diarrhea, and burning of our flesh to a deep red.” The Allen home, a concrete-block ranch house built in 1955, started to crack and crumble. Within weeks, the invisible “stuff” was peeling and blistering the paint and plaster, and disintegrating curtains and clothing.

  “Dishes were eaten until they looked like mice had chewed them around the edges,” Mrs. Allen later told reporters Jack Porter and Tex Lowell. “Black holes were eaten into silver tableware, stainless steel articles, and cooking utensils.”

  While eating supper on the night of March 12, 1963, both Mr. and Mrs. Allen suddenly fainted. As soon as they recovered they fled, abandoning their furniture, clothing, and housewares. They moved twice again to homes northeast of their original spread, but the curious plague followed them. Dr. Frank Buster, the county health authority, warned them to move further away. Dr. Philip Devanney of Sayre, OK told them, “You only have hours to live if you don’t get out of what’s poisoning you.”

  The evil “stuff” spread to the Woodrow Myers farm three and a half miles south of the Allen home. The Myers’ cattle sickened, and their three small children turned frail and pale, began to lose their teeth, and suffered fits of nausea, burning skin, dysentery, and coughing. Even the mice, birds, and insects seemed to vacate the county. Forty farmers in the area appealed to Oklahoma Governor Henry Bellmon. The U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare joined the investigation. They concluded that “an air pollution problem does not exist in the vicinity.”

  The sheriff of nearby Hutchinson County, Hugh Anderson, was pressured into issuing a quarantine preventing any resident of Roger Mills County from entering Hutchinson County “until such time as the ‘stuff’ is identified.”

  Could the strange gas that took over Roger Mills County be related in any way to the UFO mystery? Oklahoma has a long and complicated history of UFO sightings going all the way back to the late 1800s. A sizable “flap” took place there in 1909-10. Just across the border from Roger Mills County, in Texas, there has been a wild rash of sightings and alleged “contacts” throughout 1966-67.

  In recent years, there have been many little-publicized poltergeist cases in which the witnesses claimed their homes reeked of the odor of rotten eggs. Objects such as ashtrays floated mysteriously around the rooms, doors opened and closed by themselves, and strange rappings occurred in the walls. Ufologists all over the world are now making a serious study of the age-old poltergeist phenomenon, searching for possible links to the UFO mystery itself. Many witnesses are convinced that invisible entities are on the prowl and, for want of a better term, they are now called “Smellies.” These “Smellies” seem to be almost always accompanied by a potent whiff of hydrogen sulfide gas. And many of the victims complain of headaches, fits of nausea, and other physical symptoms after receiving a “visit” from a “Smellie.”

  The link between the “Smellies” and the UFOs is tenuous at best. But it does seem that there are more poltergeist and “Smelly” cases in UFO flap areas than in sectors where UFO sightings are rare.

  Harry Sturdevant, a night watchman in Trenton, NJ, reportedly observed a low-flying cigar-shaped object on the night of Oct. 2, 1956. “There was a smell like sulfur or brimstone,” Sturdevant claimed, “but it was different. I don’t know what it was, really, except it was very nauseating and made me very sick. I lost my sense of taste and smell; my throat would not swallow properly. My stomach felt worse than the time I was overcome with mustard gas while fighting in France in World War I. I collapsed in pain, and lay there on the ground for half an hour before I was able to drive.”

  The symptoms for hydrogen sulfide poisoning are “corrosive action on mouth, throat, and esophagus; causes severe pain in throat and stomach,” according to the Merck Manual, a medical dictionary used by doctors. Headaches, loss of smell, weakness, reddening of the face, and coughing are among the other key symptoms. Obviously, the families in Oklahoma suffered all of these things but, in their case, something extra was apparently added. That something was so corrosive that it ate its way through chinaware and silver, and weakened concrete. And it caused the children in the afflicted area to lose their teeth. What was that “something extra?” Therein lies a bizarre scientific detective story, and an unexpected new controversy for the UFO-philes to haggle over.

  Hydrogen sulfide is not a major air pollutant, although it is a routine waste product in oil refining processes. When London, England was buried in a thick, unnatural fog for four days, from Dec. 3-7, 1962, over 4,000 people were afflicted with severe respiratory ailments, and 106 died. Investigating authorities blamed an inversion layer which, they said, kept industrial wastes such as hydrogen sulfide boxed in. But there had never been such a severe incident before – or since. Reviewing the data published on this event, it appears that many of the victim
s of this “fog” suffered the same symptoms as the harassed farmers of Oklahoma. Since American authorities completely dismissed normal air pollution as a cause for the Oklahoma “attack,” we are hard-pressed to relate the two. In view of more recent events, however, we cannot afford to overlook the possibility that the London “fog” may have been somehow connected. In fact, our natural and unnatural air pollution problem may have direct relationship to the UFO phenomenon.

  During Thanksgiving week of 1966, a heavy smog settled over the northeastern United States from Maine to Virginia. And during that week, there was an enormous UFO flap encompassing all of those states. The UFO activity seemed to concentrate particularly in New England and New Jersey. Responsible witnesses even reported mysterious objects over New York City. But, as with most of the UFO mystery, this seems coincidental and unimportant on the surface.

  Two other apparently unrelated factors have been baffling serious ufologists. One is the repeated appearance of silicon substances at alleged UFO landing sites. Three puddles of silicon were found on a beach at Presque Isle, PA after a carload of people reported seeing a triangular-shaped object land there on July 31, 1966. The Air Force collected samples and claimed it was nothing but urine. Policemen on the site also collected samples, and had it analyzed on their own. It proved to be silicon, a plastic-like, non-metallic substance. A similar substance was found at the site of the Socorro, NM landing reported by policeman Lonnie Zamora in 1964. Silicon has been repeatedly found at many other such sites. The Air Force persists in mistakenly calling it “silica,” which is common sand.

  The other puzzling factor is the continuous UFO activity within the immediate vicinity of – of all things – fertilizer factories! Such factories deal with nitrates and phosphates. In one recent case near Syracuse, NY, a family began to suffer from poltergeist phenomena. A team of investigators headed by Prof. Gordon Evans and William Donovan, head of the Aerial Investigation and Research Corp. (AIR), discovered the witnesses’ home was very close to a fertilizer factory. Trees in the vicinity had been cleanly knocked down in a row, indicating that something heavy and airborne had plowed through them.

  Chemical factories in the Ohio River Valley have also been the sites of frequent low-level, hovering UFO activity in the past year, as have the large chemical factories in the vicinity of the Wanaque Reservoir in New Jersey. Early in my investigations in these areas, I searched for a common denominator – a factor that might be present in each case. Hydrogen sulfide proved not to be that factor, although some of these factories were spewing sulfides from their smokestacks. Some of the factories along the Ohio were employing silicons in the manufacture of rubber, but silicon isn’t present in every UFO case.

  There is, however, one thing that all of these places have in common, and it provides a startling key to what may be really going on. The immediate and obvious implications are so complex and so “far out” that many readers will reject it. You must remember that what is being offered here is a mere summary of the extensive data that has been collected.

  Before I can spell out that common factor in acceptable terms, I must discuss some other apparently unrelated mysteries. Then we’ll try to add it all up.

  Back in 1955, the late Gen. George C. Marshall allegedly made a most astonishing statement to the British ufologist, Dr. Rolf Alexander. “United States authorities have established the fact that flying saucers are manned by visitors from outer space,” Marshall is supposed to have said. “And these visitors are trying to work out a method of breathing and staying alive in our atmosphere before landing and establishing contact.”

  In 1959, Gen. Nathan Twining, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to Vice Adm. R.N. Hillenkoetter and remarked that attempts had been made to communicate with the UFOs, but they had failed because of “physical reasons.”

  A number of the people who have reported encounters with the “invisible Smellies” have said that they heard the sound of gasping and heavy breathing during their experience. Several “silent contactees,” who claim to have had face-to-face confrontations with the UFO occupants, have also reported that the entities seemed to have trouble breathing. Since none of these people can prove the validity of their stories, we are forced to accept them at face value. But this breathing problem is definitely a common factor in such reported encounters. Perhaps General Marshall was right. “Breathing and staying alive in our atmosphere” may be a serious problem for some of “them.”

  There seems to be a higher rate of “Smelly” activity and direct “contact” in the vicinity of chemical and fertilizer factories. Naturally this has been carefully checked to find out if the witnesses might not have smelled “normal” factory odors. But most of these people had lived in the area for years, and were convinced that the odors invading their homes had nothing to do with the output of the factories. Although much of our data is still admittedly fragmentary, and investigating and correlating these factors is a tremendous undertaking, we can hazard a guess and say that it seems probable that some of the entities are able to “breathe more easily” in the immediate area of the factories. This would account for the apparent concentration of such stories around the plants.

  Carrying this hypothesis a step further, we might suggest that the entities “take their own atmosphere along with them” when visiting places where there are no factories spewing gases into the air. Thus, Roger Mills County in Oklahoma was suffering a change of atmosphere. Toxic (to us) gasses were introduced into the wide-open spaces so that the UFOs and their mysterious occupants could exist there, and operate from some kind of hidden land base. Since the county has become “taboo” land, avoided by all the nearby inhabitants, the UFOs could operate with impunity.

  In other cases, such as the Somerville, NJ and Archbold, OH incidents cited earlier, the towns were evacuated because of a gas that smelled like sewer gas (hydrogen sulfide again). Maybe the entities were able to perform some mysterious errand there, unharmed by the presence of troublesome humans.

  This all makes a crazy, science-fictionish kind of sense, but even this may be a simplification of what is really going on. We still have to travel far before we can arrive at a real answer.

  Throughout the year 1954, thousands of automobile windshields suddenly shattered or became strangely pitted. Maybe it happened to your own car. Newspapers from Canada to Florida busily reported this peculiar phenomenon, which actually began in 1952 and continued to the fall of 1954. It recurred in 1957. Police departments and investigating scientists were baffled. Plate-glass store windows were also affected, and hundreds of people in Toronto complained of a mysterious substance falling from the sky that burned their skins.

  Whatever this stuff was, there was apparently a healthy (or unhealthy) rain of it throughout the United States. It had somewhat the same effect as the “stuff” that haunted Oklahoma a decade later, and ate holes in china.

  In that strange summer of 1954, thousands of people reported UFOs in the skies over Rome, Italy. One of the witnesses was Mrs. Claire Booth Luce, then U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. She, like hundreds of other people in Rome, was stricken with an odd malady that sapped her vitality and reduced her to a thin, pale shade of her former self. Eventually her bewildered doctors decided she was suffering from lead poisoning, brought about by the lead content in the paint on the walls of her Rome apartment.

  Hundreds of people around the little town of Barrie, Ontario were laid low by “lead poisoning” three years later, during a massive UFO flap there in 1957. They became weak, nauseous, mentally confused, and their doctors were unable to alleviate their illness. The odd ailments lasted for about two weeks. Some residents complained that their water (mostly from private wells), turned green during that period. (In July 1967, the tap water in Civitavecchia, Italy also turned a bright green. Authorities shut down the town’s plumbing while they searched for the cause. If they found it, it was never revealed.)

  Clouds of gas, foul odors, pitted windshields, fertilizer fac
tories, mysterious maladies, and green water… Where is all this leading us, and what has it got to do with flying saucers? It is leading us to still another unexplained phenomenon, something well known to every UFO-phile. We call it “angel hair.”

  For centuries, there have been reports of this peculiar, cobweb-like material falling from the sky and melting away when touched. Ships at sea have been covered with it. Farmers have awakened in the morning to find their fields strewn with it. Many people have attempted to collect it and have it analyzed, but it always seems to dissolve, even in sealed bottles. In Nov. 1954, a Mrs. Dittmar of Marysville, OH reported seeing great quantities of the stuff spew out of a silver cigar-shaped UFO. “It was soft and fine to the touch,” she said, “but not sticky. It stretches without tearing, although it stains the hands green.”

  During my travels investigating new UFO incidents throughout the country, several people have told me of having witnessed falls of “angel hair,” but only one man has claimed to have obtained a sample and had it analyzed. In Aug. 1967, this man phoned me long distance. He identified himself as “Philip Berger.” He said that he lived in Virginia, and had been reading my articles. Berger came up with something so startling that it might be a serious mistake to overlook it.

  Mr. Berger said that his farm had been covered with strange strands of a substance that looked like “spun glass” (a common description for “angel hair”), and that he had managed to pick up some of it with a stick. He filled a plastic bottle to the brim with it, he said, and was staring at it as he talked with me. “Funny thing,” he remarked, “the bottle is already half empty. I stuffed it full this morning.”

  He asked me what he should do with it next. On the spur of the moment, I suggested he rush it to the nearest druggist and see if they could suggest a nearby lab that might analyze it. Since it was “melting” fast, I proposed that he have the air in the bottle analyzed as well. Two days later, he called me back. He sounded discouraged and apologetic.